Promising Playwright, February 2018

For Leo Warner, writing is a wonderful way to explore his imagination. In Ms. Fatima’s class at Truesdell Education Campus, this sixth grader decided to write a play that pushes the boundaries of fantasy and sci-fi! In his play, Leo introduces us to Xenuyes (Zee-NU-yez) who is part of an alien species called the Blue People. His people stole something from another alien species called the Green People. To make things right, Xenuyes travels to the planet of Blueberries to ask the Green People to forgive his people, but a deviant character named Miltek tries to stop him from completing his mission at all costs.

Leo admits that he’s still fleshing out all of the juicy details, but if it wasn’t for the encouragement of YPT teaching artist Ms. Fatima, he wouldn’t have gotten started in the first place. “I had missed a couple of classes and when I came back, I didn’t know how I could catch up and get started,” says Leo. “But Ms. Fatima told me to think of anything I wanted, so I came up with this idea.”

But Leo is not new to writing. This may be his first play, but he’s written poetry and even performed his poetry on stage as a poet/soccer player with DC nonprofit DC SCORES, which he also loves. “On some days it’s [soccer] practice, and on other days it’s writing. We plan for the poetry slam which happens each year.” He also plays soccer for Truesdell and hopes to either play soccer professionally or become a writer when he gets older.

Overall, Leo enjoys writing with YPT and thinks every kid should do it! “It’s pretty fun. If you get your work done on time, you get to see how it turns out,” Leo explains. “And you get to see if you are good at writing and if you like writing at all. You might not know that you like writing and then you end up figuring out that you like it a lot.”